Jean-Philippe Rameau, Castor et Pollux (1737)

French opera is almost as old as Italian, and yet for whatever reason, you don't hear much about the French baroque. Or at least I don't. So I watched this. As far as I can tell--and I know it's absurd to generalize from a sample size of one, but the wikipedia entry on French opera confirms that this is the norm--the three biggest differences are:

1. A lot more time given over to elaborate dances;

2. Much more straightforward plots than the byzantine opera seria style; and

3. Probably most significantly: no castrato roles. More because for whatever reason the French didn't like the style than any moral reasons, but still, they weren't complicit in that particular evil, so good for them. It's a very intriguing and probably unsolvable mystery, though: what reasons would there be for that cultural difference?

I watched this performance. It only has French subtitles, but I figured I'd still be able to follow along. That...was not as true as one would have hoped; it turns out that eighteenth-century opera is harder than Disney comics. Go figure. Nonetheless, with what I was able to glean from the subtitles plus the wikipedia summary, I could basically tell what was happening.

Well, it's the story of Castor and Pollux, though Rameau presents the story a little differently than I know it. So Castor has a lame human father, and therefore is mortal. Alas, he dies. Well, it was bound to happen. Pollux is the son of Jupiter and therefore immortal. He's in love with Télaïre (there's also another woman, Phébé, who's in unrequited love with him, but she doesn't amount to much) but alas, she's in love with his dead brother, and asks him to get his dad to bring him back. Though conflicted, he agrees to this, Pa says nope, laws of fate, not gonna do it, wouldn't be prudent. The only solution of sorts is for him to replace his brother in the underworld. In the Elysian Fields, Castor is nonetheless sad for having lost his love. He agrees to go back up, but only for a day, to say farewell to her. Nobody's really happy about the situation, but then Jupiter appears on the scene and says, okay, you can both be immortal, but you have to be a constellation. Jupiter seems to have a weird sense of humor. But anyway, there you go, problem solved. Sort of.

The plot is, I mean, perfectly serviceable. It works. But, my god, the music is just utterly sublime. Don't know that I could determine whether it was French or Italian from listening to it, but it's really, really gorgeous, and I was highly satisfied. There's no reason this stuff should be less known (at least in my head) than its Italian counterpart. This here production is...well, probably not all that far off from how it would originally have been performed; very traditional and minimalistic. Beautiful singing. To say I wanted to see more operas by Rameau would be...accurate.

Here's a kind of funny bit from the opera's wikipedia page:

Castor et Pollux appeared in 1737 while the controversy ignited by Rameau's first opera Hippolyte et Aricie was still raging. Conservative critics held the works of the "father of French opera", Jean-Baptiste Lully, to be unsurpassable. They saw Rameau's radical musical innovations as an attack on all they held dear and a war of words broke out between these Lullistes and the supporters of the new composer, the so-called Rameauneurs (or Ramistes). This controversy ensured that the premiere of Castor would be a noteworthy event.

It just goes to show: today, this argument is utterly meaningless to the layman, and even a trained musicologist would only be able to understand it on a theoretical level. But they really cared! Consider this the next time you see a youtube comment to the effect of "I wish music was still like this and not garbage like Justin Bieber." It's always Justin Bieber, for whatever reason.